Am I Shadow-Banned?

A few of my readers believe that I might be.

This might as well be my slogan.

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Note

As you might know, I haven’t been feeling well in the last four weeks (it must show at the depth of my posts, too), but catching up now. For some mysterious reason, a few days ago, my condition started to improve, although it’s not over yet.

While most “alt” sites are harping on the sooner-or-later lethal injections and perhaps Pfizer, with a tinge of spice from Trump’s kitchen cabinet, for me, it’s a bit embarrassing that whatever is still relevant, I have already covered or others did it better than I could have, and I am running low on topics. Still, this type of crisis has been happening a lot in the last three years, and somehow, it always resolved itself¹.

Have I been shadow-banned?

According to Wikipedia, whose definition happens to be satisfactory for this purpose,

Shadow banning, also known as stealth banning, hell banning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

There is no way to prove that I am, but checking out figures and a few variables seem to suggest more than nothing, and Substack graciously supplies them.

Although reading and commenting are free, I also have paying supporters, which allows me to devote more time to this stack instead of having to make money elsewhere. I am also working from home, but I don’t have the time to be present with my publications anywhere else, and I’m not even sure how long I would be allowed to publish on alternative sites (there is no insurance on Substack, either, but so far, so good). Still, in the last 10 days, such support decreased by $411, which is a larger loss than the normal fluctuation. Is it that I am getting worse, is it that people are slowly getting poorer, or I am being meticulously phased out?² Ko-Fi, Buy-me-a-coffee, and PayPal didn’t generate more than $100 altogether in the last three months, so most of my help comes from paid subscriptions, which have increased by about 10 percent in the last two years, while the readership more than doubled.

Currently, I have about 4,700 readers, that is, 3,300 subscribers and 1,400 “followers” (followers do not receive my e-mail notifications about corrections and updates). In the first 24 hours, about 1,300-1,600 readers read my articles (on special occasions, slightly more than 6,000), and less than half of that on the second day. After the first two days, the numbers become negligible, because readers tend to treat my work as journalism, which it is not, except for the style of presentation for easy reading. Most of my articles remain relevant for quite a while, ranging from weeks or months to the times, when someone else can come up with something better.

Also, two months ago, I used to have a steady 65 thousand visitors a month, but for last month, it was only slightly over 41,000. Google searches for Ray Horvath used to bring up my articles, but these days, “Substack” must be added to the search. I am not persecuted or declared a mis/disinformer, most likely because because that would attract attention and popularize me. I contemplated the problem of limiting my audience in

For the “authorities,” my work might be simply considered an inconspicuous tune in the cacophonous noise out there, which keeps me on the periphery.

A few readers indicated that they were not receiving notifications about my posts, and they have to check out my stack on their own. Readers recommending my articles to their friends and to fellow readers could increase my readership, especially if newcomers explored my previous pieces by looking for key words under “Archive” on my main page. Occasionally, I also have readers whose opinions cannot tolerate my ideas, and they sign off after realizing I am not supporting Trump or any other politician, and handful of constitutionalists and statists unsubscribed after my post on the Constitution. I’m comfortable with causing cognitive dissonance, because my job here goes well beyond looking appealing; pleasing everyone would be dishonorable, anyway. Nonetheless, the number of my readers have been slowly, but steadily increasing since my first day on Substack, May 6th, 2022. Still, I am not here for me to become known or respected, but only because I want to do something useful before I check out.

Silly me; of course, all these signs can simply indicate a prelude to deepfakes replacing authors, a process that has been going on for 7-8 years in distant relationships:

To settle it once and for all, if I am shadow-banned, it’s doing a favor, because it limits my readership to those who are interested. It’s also a favor to my readers, because they can keep better company for each other.

1. This time, when I was at my wit’s end, I managed to scrape up something new and add it to my summary of nanotech poisoning in

My last comparable piece evaluated the roles of various participants in the globalist project on a good three weeks ago:

2. Incremental stifling of alternative voices has been certainly going on. Previously-reliable authors are now dishing out predictable, useless, or obsolete information or blatant lies. Hardly anyone left out of the old guard, and it’s mostly small authors, whose readership is well below 10 thousand.